Additional gold sink

[debo]

IMO: "coin toss"

or better: "gold to rockets"

[Nick]

The thread title keeps making me think it's about Nethack...

[Timo Pietilä]

Taxation!

In fact Larn has a tax system, although not one which I would really recommend copying. It has one other feature which would make people think twice about accumulating gold: it's not weightless.

You are in task of replacing evil demigod with yourself and someone makes you pay taxes??

I don't think I would comply with that.

You already have sword in one hand, bow in other, shield in other and torch in other and still have enough free hands to manipulate things like arrows, wands, staves and stuff. And you don't wear any pants. I think player is not humanoid, but something closer to highly evolved cephalopod or crustacean.

Having weightless money is quite tiny issue compared to that.

[fizzix]

Might as well through out some of the other ideas I had for gold. Some of these have been mentioned before:

Custom purchases: everything has a price. Want a +19, +19 Holy Avenger Mace of Destruction? It can be made in town. Should probably require a lot more gold that I usually get in a game. You could even do a "fashion your own artifact" for gobs of money. Or if that's a bit too much, a "buy a random high powered randart" like they have in ToME4.

Entrance fee for vaults. These vaults have far fewer monsters in them and probably more items. But it requires a significant amount of money to get in. Probably should prevent detection (by not spawning items/monsters in the vault until the fee is paid).

Enchantments: These should probably appear randomly in the dungeon as shrines or something. Want to get that artifact armor back up to +15, pay money to the enchantment shrine. Once (if) we import something like v4 items, we can have shrines of greater enchantment which can infuse weapons/armor with a random ability (like rFire or SInv).

[mushroom patch]

Gold is not "trying to solve an in-game problem." The existence of gold and shops is simply trope of role-playing games, which came to angband through moria, which took the concept from dungeons and dragons. You don't need gold or shops to win, although it's not as smooth a ride.

It would absolutely be a reasonable option to remove shops and gold entirely, but you'd be cutting out a lot of fundamental angband flavor.

About enchantment increases and so on. Gold is a theoretically unlimited resource. It should not be used to buy things that are impossible to get otherwise (or which would take astronomical amounts of time to find naturally). The ability to improve items along the lines described above would break the game and make scumming even more mindless and necessary. Gold should be used to reduce the amount of time to get things you could ordinarily get in a reasonable amount of time scumming only.

[wobbly]

You could perhaps make gold take space? (weight favours strong characters) & not storable at home (thieves?). That'd allow you to limit it to enough to recover consumables.

[Derakon]

You could perhaps make gold take space? (weight favours strong characters) & not storable at home (thieves?). That'd allow you to limit it to enough to recover consumables.

You could do this, and NetHack for example does. My big concern is that STR and CON are already incredibly important stats for every character, so I'm leery of making STR even more vital. You'd also have to rebalance the rate at which money is dropped since players wouldn't be able to just mindlessly hoover up all the coins they encounter...and you'd probably have to also continue to track the materials that money is made out of (copper vs. gold vs. mithril etc.) so the player can easily "compact" their money into a form with better value-to-weight ratios.

Not to mention rebalance the cost of basically everything.

Basically it's a lot of work to implement, and I'm not sure it'd actually improve gameplay.

[EpicMan]

Players end up with a ton of gold and hardly anything to buy it with, but still end up grinding for endgame consumables - !Heal, !*Heal*, !Life, !RMana, ?Banishment, ?MassBanish, ?*Destruction*.

The most direct solution is to allow players to buy some or all of these for exorbitant sums of money. You could open a new store after killing Sauron (as less consumables are needed for him than Morgoth), or just have them available in 4/5 or 7 but 10x the cost.

This gives some usefulness to the town after the beginning of the game, while keeping the player searching the dungeon for their endgame equipment (it's fun right then to find a better piece of gear, finding another !*Heal* is like "Oh, just need X more of these before I can do something").

[werepacman]

In nppangband you can fireproof a spellbook, but I think there is no problem with fireproof and acid proof any item.

One more idea for spending gold on middle levels - to buy a map from traveler to some sicret cave where at least one artifact is hidden. And there is a nasty thing in this cave of course.

[mushroom patch]

Players end up with a ton of gold and hardly anything to buy it with, but still end up grinding for endgame consumables - !Heal, !*Heal*, !Life, !RMana, ?Banishment, ?MassBanish, ?*Destruction*.

The most direct solution is to allow players to buy some or all of these for exorbitant sums of money. You could open a new store after killing Sauron (as less consumables are needed for him than Morgoth), or just have them available in 4/5 or 7 but 10x the cost.

This gives some usefulness to the town after the beginning of the game, while keeping the player searching the dungeon for their endgame equipment (it's fun right then to find a better piece of gear, finding another !*Heal* is like "Oh, just need X more of these before I can do something").

Indeed. This would be the simplest, but still good, way to go.

[Nick]

Players end up with a ton of gold and hardly anything to buy it with, but still end up grinding for endgame consumables - !Heal, !*Heal*, !Life, !RMana, ?Banishment, ?MassBanish, ?*Destruction*.

The most direct solution is to allow players to buy some or all of these for exorbitant sums of money. You could open a new store after killing Sauron (as less consumables are needed for him than Morgoth), or just have them available in 4/5 or 7 but 10x the cost.

This gives some usefulness to the town after the beginning of the game, while keeping the player searching the dungeon for their endgame equipment (it's fun right then to find a better piece of gear, finding another !*Heal* is like "Oh, just need X more of these before I can do something").

This is precisely what I did in FAangband, although it happened more as a side effect of another store existing than as an attempt to make endgame gold relevant.

My general position on this is that having more gold than you can use in the late game is simply a consequence of the way the game unfolds, and I'm really reluctant to use it for anything meaningful. Maybe the player should be allowed to build a solid gold house.

[MattB]

Maybe the player should be allowed to build a solid gold house.

I did that. But I was playing minecraft at the time.
Took me three years.

[MattB]

Custom purchases: everything has a price. Want a +19, +19 Holy Avenger Mace of Destruction? It can be made in town. Should probably require a lot more gold that I usually get in a game. You could even do a "fashion your own artifact" for gobs of money. Or if that's a bit too much, a "buy a random high powered randart" like they have in ToME4.

I really like the idea of a random randart. Should cost at least a million. I'm thinking of something with power randomly allocated between 300-500 (and independent of your standart/randart set). You might be playing a mage with Boots of Speed +10 and get Boots +12 to Dam and +6Dex. [Squelch]
Or, you might be playing a warrior with a redundant Cloak of Aman who suddenly gets a Cloak with +9Dam, +4 Speed and your last two resistance holes covered. I like it. Consider it a little flutter after Sauron and before Morgoth. Maybe even make it only available after Sauron's down - as has been mooted before.

Entrance fee for vaults. These vaults have far fewer monsters in them and probably more items. But it requires a significant amount of money to get in. Probably should prevent detection (by not spawning items/monsters in the vault until the fee is paid).

Again, I like it. In my mind it would be a shop in the hard edge of town that only sells one item, again for a million AU, called 'Entry'. Once bought that shop entrance disappears and allows access to a vault just as Fizzix described. Might well contain nothing useful, of course, but would still be a box ticked in @'s progression (or not, of course, up to the player).

Enchantments: These should probably appear randomly in the dungeon as shrines or something. Want to get that artifact armor back up to +15, pay money to the enchantment shrine. Once (if) we import something like v4 items, we can have shrines of greater enchantment which can infuse weapons/armor with a random ability (like rFire or SInv).

This I'm not keen on. I agree with Mushroom Patch when he says:

About enchantment increases and so on. Gold is a theoretically unlimited resource. It should not be used to buy things that are impossible to get otherwise (or which would take astronomical amounts of time to find naturally). The ability to improve items along the lines described above would break the game and make scumming even more mindless and necessary. Gold should be used to reduce the amount of time to get things you could ordinarily get in a reasonable amount of time scumming only.

[AnonymousHero]

Might as well through out some of the other ideas I had for gold. Some of these have been mentioned before:

Custom purchases: everything has a price. Want a +19, +19 Holy Avenger Mace of Destruction?

Well, you can't have it! There, that wasn't so bad, was it?

PS: Remove gold! Down with gold!

[AnonymousHero]

Gold is a resource that the player has to accumulate.

This is not a valid problem statement, AFAICT. What does the accumulation of gold achieve in the game?